FUNNY WOMEN #94: An Actual Missed Connection

You: Conceptual Ideal of PersonMe: Conceptual Ideal of PersonCorner of Sixth and the end of the universe where reality blurs

I would like to tell you that we’ve run into each other a few times, but that would be a lie, because this is a missed connection, not a connected connection or a nearly missed connection. This is not one of those “we connected, but I failed to follow through because I have abandonment issues” connection. This is a missed connection, and as such I am very sorry that our connection was missed, or maybe I’m not, I don’t know, because I’ve never met you.

When we never see each other, the chemistry isn’t so much electric as it is invisible and imaginary. You are shy or outgoing or flirtatious or demure. You’re a nice or not guy or girl or other. We keep on not running into each other and thereby missing out on something special or completely bland. You are or aren’t attractive, and I’m pretty sure you haven’t noticed me. I wonder if our attraction or indifference is mutual.

Your attention lingers off me a little bit too long for me to consider this merely a coincidence.

You are involved with someone, or you’re not. However, they don’t completely understand you. Or maybe they are overwhelmingly, sickeningly empathetic. I’m not about to mess things up, but you most certainly deserve better, perhaps, maybe.

Anyway.

I never saw you at a coffee shop, and we never made eye contact awkwardly. I never brushed against your hand in a way that made either your heart leap or you wash your hands five times with the rough side of a sponge to scour it clean. Will it ever be clean again, or is the filth on the inside? I don’t know. I don’t know how you usually react in that situation because our connection has been unequivocally missed.

I don’t know if I’m content or miserable that we missed our connection. I suppose since our eyes never met across the room at a crowded cage fight, we have never known the true passion lodged in each other. We never clasped hands in a darkened restaurant and then struggled to eat with only one hand. We never screamed and threw sharp things at each other across the room, near the bed where that one time you moan-said your psychiatrist’s name and I pretended not to notice. We never kissed sloppily in the rain under the poison oak. We never got poison oak. Nor have we tearfully admitted that we slept with the other’s best friend–and that it didn’t mean anything but maybe pay more attention to me and don’t ignore my text messages when you’re playing Call of Duty. We’ve never held each other through a long night, imagining how it would feel to cut the other person. All these feelings of regret and confusion are absent because, or not exactly because, we missed our connection.

Subsequently, what if we met up for coffee? Ride a tandem canoe built for two? Grow old together? Or continue to never interact ever in all of existence? The ball is in your hoop. Find me on Twitter. And then follow me on Twitter.

Barbara Holm is a stand up comedian and writer in Portland, Oregon. She has performed at the Bridgetown Comedy Festival and San Francisco Sketchfest. She writes a weekly humor column for The Portland Mercury called "My Least Favorite Piece of Misogyny This Week." She has written for IGN, the Huffington Post, and Bitch. She has been described as a "comedy wizard" by Seattle City Arts Magazine, and the Seattle Stranger Newspaper describes her as an "adorable wunderkind," and she describes herself as "running away from this question to hide under the desk right now." Follow her on Twitter @barbara_holm.
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